David Kenney Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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It’s really easy to forget that there is a world out there beyond what we know about as photographers in the government sector. In 1980 I saw classified photographic images taken by what was then known as satellite imagery, the photographic image had so much detail you could clearly make out the Cyrillic letter characters on the cigarette package in great detail. Little did I know at the time but I was staring at what we now know as digital imagery. I must admit I was somewhat perplexed at how the images were recovered from space but when I ask the question about how the images ended up on earth I was told my security clearance was not even close to being high enough to know the basics of how the data got to the earth station.
During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 one of the local television stations in DFW area did a story a local company who had contracted to provide the installation of a camera pod on a government airplane. If my memory serves me correctly the plane belonged to the Louisiana National Guard and was to be used to help make an assessment of
the damage caused by the storm. I remember the camera pod contained three different cameras and each camera could be used to record the same data, one camera was a conventional film camera, one camera was inferred and the third camera was an 80 megapixel digital camera. Needless to say when I heard that there was an 80 megapixel camera chip I immediately got on line to see what I could find out about this camera; I could find no mention of any 80 megapixel camera chip or camera body using any of the search engines available. The next day I went to the television web site and the story had been removed from the station web site, I then called the television station and tried to find out more information about the story and why the story was not on the web site, I was told the government had requested that the story be removed from the web site.
There is a saying exist in the engineering departments of certain third sector entities “IF you have the knowledge to think about any form of technology the technology already is already in existence or if it does not exist it can be built”.
I heard about the Nikon D3 about a year before it was announced, at the time I was using D200’s as tween camera I had been looking at Canon because in my estimation Canon had a better product line. The Nikon rep that persuaded me to wait for the D3 to be announced was correct in everything he told me about the D3, I would be very careful in attacking what Kitty said, perhaps she has knowledge that we are not privy to.
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